Tag Archives: Christian Vandepas

Sultry Bonnie & Clyde Steams Up The Joint At Slow Burn Theatre

With Bonnie & Clyde, Slow Burn Theatre Company has found the strengths in a “troubled” work and forged an entertaining even intermittently thrilling work. It keeps nudging upward the level of quality and polish without sacrificing a commitment to tackling edgy, difficult work that few would attempt.

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POZ, Getting Its World Premiere At Island City Stage, Has Its Share of Positives and Negatives

Loaded with lots of laugh lines and inside theater jokes, POZ at Island City Stage has some supremely likeable characters. Yet there’s just something a little bit too snappy about this world premiere. It tries just a bit too hard, especially when convincing the audience that this lively cast of characters are real people with real problems.

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Ground Up And Rising’s Dying City Struggles For Clarity, But Has A Solid Performance

The ultimate themes and intended resonances of Dying City dance just out of intellectual reach in Ground Up and Rising’s brave but flawed production, but the audience gets some reward sifting through the intriguing confusion as they seek graspable meaning.

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Ground Up Batters Away At The Damage War Does To the Soul

Ground Up & Rising’s courageous production of 9 Circles is a dichotomy that is deeply felt and deeply flawed at the same time – bluntly and uninhibitedly slashing away at one dimension of a brilliant subtle multi-dimensional script.

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God Of Isaac Explores Search For Identity With Humor & Heart

Jews honor a direct bond with their forebears stretching across 6,000 years. That cornerstone of Passover also underlies James Sherman’s The God of Isaac, enjoying an enthusiastic and effective revival at Broward Stage Door. But the search for roots makes the show relatable to anyone living in this nation of immigrants.

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Slow Burn Holds Courageous, Dark And Difficult Parade

Even if Slow Burn’s moving production of the dark and dangerous musical Parade wasn’t the success that it indeed is, the troupe would deserve honor for the fearlessness in choosing a pre-ordained tragedy about anti-Semitism that mixes soaring melodies with discomforting dissonance. But this company has again delivered an enviable piece of theater that challenges the audience as well as its artists.

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Alliance’s Savage In Limbo Examines Everyday Lives Of Not-So-Quiet Desperation

Inarticulate people hold forth in a bar in a torrent of existential philosophy and metaphorical verbiage in John Patrick Shanley’s Savage In Limbo at the Alliance Theatre Lab. But if Shanley lets them go on way too long, it’s undeniable that this cast wrenches at the audience’s heart as they depict humanity’s fundamental yearning to change their lives and find “something better.”

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Slow Burn’s Sweeney Todd Is Competent But Not Thrilling

So much is right about Slow Burn Theatre Company’s scaling of that Everest of musical theater, Sweeney Todd, that there’s no shame to acknowledge that it’s a competent not a transporting production.

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Slow Burn’s Avenue Q Has Actors Talking To Their Hands

Backstage at rehearsals for this weekend’s opening of Slow Burn Theatre Company’s Avenue Q, it was not unusual to find actors offstage talking to their puppets. Michael Westrich, who portrays college graduate Princeton, said it goes farther than that. “Sometimes we’re backstage having a conversation and we find the puppets are talking.”

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